ENHANCING CONTROL FLOW COMPREHENSION USING ZOOM VISUAL FLOW (ZViF) TECHNIQUE TO REPRESENT CONTROL STRUCTURES
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Date
2011-03
Authors
KADAR, ROZITA
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Abstract
When novice users learn programming, they have to comprehend a lot of things
related to programming. Many techniques and tools have been developed to help users
to improve their program comprehension but most tools are unsuitable for novices.
Some tools are not user friendly, some designs are just for expert programmers and
some Integrated Development Environment (IDE) are very simple and fail to expose
users to the real world environment. These hinder the learning process and may become
obstacles to users who have no programming background. The scope of the study is on
visualization technique to represent control structures for novice users. The main goal of
this work is to give some insights on how to improve visual presentation method in
program editor or an IDE. This study attempts to improve control flow comprehension
by using Zoom Visual Flow (ZViF) technique that represents source code in graphical
view. Two lab experiments and a comparative study were conducted to determine the
effectiveness of the technique. The result shows that users prefer the proposed technique
that helps to improve control flow comprehension among novices much better than
Control Structured Diagrams (CSD) technique and text-based IDE.
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ENHANCING CONTROL FLOW COMPREHENSION USING ZOOM VISUAL FLOW